USB as primary storage.

[AtomRiot]

So i am sure that there is not a device in commercial existance but would it be possible to do like a raid stripping accross multiple usb drives?
It would be cool if you could have something that ran through the usb port on the back but i would invision that it would more likely have to have some sort of conversion over to scsi or sata.
it would be kind of like a coupler that would use multiple usb sticks to form one large drive. it wouldnt get too hot, it wouldnt be too cheap and it isnt too practical but it would be pretty cool.
also, why do they not have firewire thumb drives? firewire is not too fast for the solid state memory, is it just not as practical or too expensive and because firewire is too slow to be adopted by everyone?

Change - Its the way of the future!

 

[Crashman]

USB 2.0 and Firewire are both too slow to take advantage of the speed of a single drive, let alone a RAID array. Those big numbers you see are megaBITS per second, divide by 8 to get megaBYTES per second, then divide that in 2 again to compensate for overhead: these controllers aren't very efficient with the limitted bandwidth they have.

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[AtomRiot]

at what speed to handheld devices run? i know they have everything loaded on the chips but is there an equivlency in speed of data transfer? Im not sure if i am making sence.

Change - Its the way of the future!

 

[Crashman]

Yes, I see where you're going there, but I don't have the transfer rates for any memory stick or USB key at hand. They are fairly slow, even compared to USB 2.0, so you COULD increase USB key performance by "RAIDing" them.

Windows RAID allows for basic stuff like that, why don't you try it? Yes you'd still have Windows itself on a hard drive, but you could at least try setting up a Windows RAID of USB keys for testing purposes.

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[folken]

I ran a couple speed tests on my 1GB PQI Istick just to see what I'd get. SiSoft Sandra says 7,646kb/s read and 5,461kb/s write. Nero says the drive speed is 6,580kb/s. Not to bad for a little ah heck. It would be interesting to see what raiding them would do. Can you even make a pendrive a dynamic volume?

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[AtomRiot]

Well i have not had a chance to play with my two sticks, i am trying to get some people to let me borrow theres but i have found this in the mean time.

http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/08/1512201&from=rss

RAID'd ipod shuffles. interesting idea but they were not able to install OS X onto it.

Change - Its the way of the future!

 

[folken]

Even if they couldn't get an OS on it I still aplaud them for actually finding a use for those shuffles, lol.

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[AtomRiot]

haha, yes i want to see the 60gb ipods RAID'd
though the idea on the slashdot site about having important info on different shuffles with different people would be cool. it would be even better if you could have normal functionality of the shuffle with say 256MB of space and the rest is dedicated to a RAID of sorts that would allow the shuffle to look even more harmless.

Change - Its the way of the future!

 

[Codesmith]

Or you can use an external enclosure that supports both SATA and USB 2.0. The one's I have seen convert IDE to either SATA or USB 2.0.

When using the SATA connectors its the same as having an internal drive, you can put your OS on them, raid them, whatever.

Probably a bit slower if you go the IDE to SATA route due to extra overhead, but one that used SATA drives wouldn't have that problem.

 

[AtomRiot]

but those sata to usb do not convert it the right way do they. are you talking about having an external sata drive that connects via usb? if so i dont think you can use that hardware to reverses the flow and make it usb to sata

Change - Its the way of the future!

 

[folken]

There are external enclosures that take sata drives and have both sata passthrough and usb/firewire. I believe I have also seen the IDE drive enclosures that have an sata plug as well.
You always see those sata plugs in a pci slot cover, this is what they are for

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[AtomRiot]

but can you reverse the direction of the information.
i know they have the sata to usb for external like

|SATA| -> |USB| ->(EXTERNAL) |Computer|

but can you just turn it around so it is like

|USB| -> |SATA| ->(INTERNAL) |Computer|



Change - Its the way of the future!

 

[folken]

Hm... I don't think there is anything that can do that. You wouldn't need it though. The enclosures have an sata plug on them so you can just run sata cable from the enclosure to your computer.

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